How to find out the top journals in a field or discipline?

Do you need to find the most influential or most impactful journals in a field or discipline? Maybe you’re new to research and you’ve been assigned a project to read articles from the top journals in mechanical engineering. Or maybe you’re a grad student who is just getting started in psychology and you want to get a sense of what are the major topics being covered in journals.  Or maybe you’re a faculty researcher who is reaching into a new discipline as part of a collaboration and you need some ideas of where to publish.  

If you’re at NC State University, you can always reach out to a subject liaison librarian and we can help you get started. To get an idea of how we might help, here’s a quick overview for quickly getting to a list of top journals in a field or discipline. This is not the only method, so if you want advice on others, just get in touch with your subject liaison librarian. 

Summary:

Do a quick search in JCR (Journal Citation Reports). This is a database that the NC State University Libraries subscribes to, so be sure to find it in our databases list to get the link to the authentication path.  Pro tip: use keywords to find any journals that have those keywords, pick one journal, then go to the "official" subject category to get a list of the most popular journals in that field or discipline.  

Step-by-step:  Let’s say you want to see the top journals that publish articles about medical devices.

(1) First, log into Journal Citation Reports (JCR). 

(2) Then, search for “medical devices” (or your topic), get a list of journals and pick one.

(3) Then you can select “Engineering, Biomedical” to see the other journals in that discipline.

(4) Click “Customize” and you can filter by the metric(s) that you care about such as total number of citations, Journal Impact Factor (JIF) or maybe even the Article Influence Score.

(5) Now that you have a list of the top journals in a field or discipline (in this example, the field is medical devices), you can open a new window or tab in your browser to access the Libraries subscriptions and read specific articles.  You can browse or search using Journal Finder or search in the catalog. 

Dig deeper:

If you’d like to explore more details, check out the guidance from Clarivate, the company that creates the Journal Citation Reports. There’s a 5 minute video that explains how Clarivate measures journal quality and even a Manuscript Matcher Tool (requires that you create a free account to use it)